Monday, October 31, 2011

Drinking
in The South was a rite of passage for males. If you were going to be a man you
were going to have to drink to excess. The drug thing, not so much, but I felt
as if doing a liquid drug was good then doing a liquid and a smoke was even
better. I truly do not remember one complete week of High School. I do remember
some of the things they told me I did and I remember The Smoke Bomb. It was one
of those defining moments of my life as to whether or not I was going to live
like some sheep carrying book inside of a prison, or if I was going to voice my
concern about my general welfare by committing an act of arson and anarchy. The
idea of anarchy won. My freshman year of High school was about to become interesting.

My
father had done some black powder hunting but had more or less given it up. He
still had some metal cans with gun powder in them, and I had heard that if
sulfur burned it smelled truly rancid. I took out a small amount of black
powder from one of the cans, mixed it with some sulfur from my old chemistry
set, and set it ablaze. It was disappointing. It smelled bad, sure, but it
burned far too quickly to ignite all the sulfur. I had to come up with some
idea so I tried some filler material. I chose wax because it does burn, but not
as quick as gunpowder, and it turns into a liquid and it a bitch to put out
with water if it gets hot enough. Sulfur, gun powder, and wax worked very well
in the trials.

The boy’s
locker room at school was pretty much the standard fare locker room, but there were
a couple of the wall lockers that were broken.
No one ever used them or opened them, so a couple of days before the
event I started hauling in supplies so no one would see me come in with a lumpy
package. I brought in the wax and sulfur first because it was so benign no one
would or could accuse me of bomb making at that point, and on day of the event
I snuck in early, mixed what was about half a large manila envelope of wax
shavings, with a pound of gunpowder and two pounds of sulfur. I made a fuse that I would light using a
cigarette and hid the bomb under a pile of trash and an old dirty towel. I had
gym for the first class and obediently did my jumping jacks, push-ups, and
other exercises. While everyone else was showering and getting ready for class,
I hastily lit a cigarette, jammed it into the fuse, and then went outside to
pick a fight with one of the coaches. Coach Stocky was a bulldog of a man who never
grew higher than waist level as a child and as a result, just got broader. I asked him if he ever thought about suing
the school for building the floor so close to his ass and he went off the deep
end. A cigarette will burn down in about four minutes. A high school coach’s
attention span when focused on yelling at the school screw up is considerable
longer. About a minute deep I turned and
walked off from him which assured me he was going to grab me and made me stand
there and take it.

There
was a yell, and then another, and then there was a chorus of yelling and
screaming and suddenly the locker room began to empty out in a hurry. I
followed Stocky back into the locker room, and damn, I’m here to tell you there
was some smoke. Think, angry, grey smoke,
poured out of the locker like some Stygian nightmare with an industrial color scheme.
Like the hell it was, the locker room only needed a bat winged demon for décor.
The smart kids were getting the hell out
of dodge, some sans clothing but the rest were watching the show. Stocky grabbed a broom and tried to beat the
fire out. What he managed to do was set the broom on fire, spread my version of
Greek fire, and got a serious case of smoke inhalation. It took four of us to
carry him out of the locker room. For
reasons I never understood they never called the fire department, but damn,
what some smoke!

I knew,
really knew, if this had played out like the trials did, they would be looking
for someone’s head, and mine would be first on the block. I had learned early
on there are two rules to keep yourself out of trouble.

1.Work
alone.

2.Never
tell anyone what you’ve done.

You wouldn’t believe the trouble you’ll get into have
someone there with you. With two suspects they’ll take them to separate rooms
and tell each of them, “You buddy says this was all your idea and he was just
watching.” They both with turn on one another and they’d get humped. By this
time in my life I knew damn well I couldn’t trust anyone else, and regardless
of what you might think of the public school system, it is always the unpopular
kids who get punished more severely than those who are more culturally
acceptable. Blaming Mike Firesmith was an easy way to get out of any trouble,
and I played the reverse card on that one constantly saying they always blamed
me. This time they were right. They knew they were right. But they couldn’t
prove it.

I also
learned early on there were guys who would come up to you and pretend to be all
excited and happy and your best friend and then take what you had told them to
the principal’s office as fast as they could scurry there. So the very first
thing I did in the aftermath of the smoke bomb was to run around and asking
other guys if they had done it. I tried to get one or two to confess to me they
had while we were in front of other people, and this tactic worked better than
you could believe. Some straight laced loser who never got into any trouble
thought he would mess with me by telling me he did it but someone overheard him
bragging about it. While being interrogated I told them I had overheard a
confession and so had others.

The
incident marked a turning point between myself, the school officials, the coaches,
and most of the other students. While I never admitted to what I had done, it
was generally believed I had done it. It was the first thing I did that scared
people to the point they began to do something they had never done before; they
left me alone. Far from an act that I committed for attention, this was fang
bearing. This was a long low growl. This was my first trip into real
destruction and it showed them whatever was happening in my head had begun to accelerate.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

I have a meeting before dawn and because I am
pathologically punctual like no one else alive, I get there early, even if I am still fighting the flu. I park just
to the side of the front of a convenience store and the owner, a stern looking
man with a bushy mustache and cell phone glued to one ear, walks out to sternly
glare at me for just parking and not buying anything. It’s an impolite way of
clearing a parking space but it’s before dawn so there isn’t anyone else
around. Someone desperately seeking coffee, because drinking convenient store
coffee is like scoring heroin from someone you met in an outhouse, pulls in and
he has to retreat from his optical chastisement. This is a small town in South
Georgia and if you were to travel US84 from one side of the state to Alabama, each and every small town would be very much like the other.

My
cultural DNA is from South Georgia but sometimes I feel like a bastard child.
The convenient store is adjacent to a lot where there is one of the omnipresent
trailer houses that litter South Georgia, and this is one so stereotypical it
would be cast in a movie about South Georgia if one was ever shot. Someone took
some sort of aluminum garden shed and attached it to the front of a single wide
trailer to give them an extra bedroom. It’s judgmental, I know, and I hate
myself for thinking things like this, but I can envision some overweight
redneck tacking a shed to his trailer so his fifteen year old daughter can keep
her two kids in the same room. The other bedroom is already taken by the older
daughter who has two of kids of their own from three different fathers.

What I
should do is point out someone out there has the skill to pull off such a feat
of engineering, but I have seen far too many attempts that had failed. Enough
do work to keep others trying and when it gets right down to it, who among us
wouldn’t tack a shed to a trailer to make room for a child if that is all that
was left to do? Doesn’t it seem like a man with enough skill to put a shed onto
a trailer and make a home for his grandchildren would have the ingenuity to
make a better living? But the world doesn’t work like that. It wasn’t the men
mining for gold who made the money but the men who sold the shovels and the men
who owned the land. The men who coaxed
food from the ground as sharecroppers lived like animals while the plantation
owners lived like kings. This man attaches a garden shed to a trailer, the most
unlikely of copulations, and still lives in a hovel, however clever.

The light slowly becomes good
enough for me to see the state of ill repair of the trailer itself, with sheet
metal tacked on here and there, and pieces mismatched by color, and the layered
flashing that indicates leaks and more leaks and new leaks. Now I can see the
graveyard of car parts in the yard, an engine block rusting on the ground, and
in one window is a confederate flag with a bass in the middle.

I
despise the term poor white trash because it tosses all poor white people in
the same boat with those people who are trashy. The amount of engineering skill
it takes to attach a shed to a trailer and make it livable speaks to the ability
of someone to make a home out of nothing and being able to use your hand like
that is a gift, but it doesn’t mean someone is good with money, or has the
skills to get an education. But there is a great deal of ignorance associated
with the War Of Northern Aggression and the flag is a symbol of that ignorance.
To stick a fish in the middle of it and fly it from your bedroom window is to
assure some assumptions are going to be made about you, and here we are.

The
light filers slowly through the overcast sky and I see there is a stack of
firewood near a pecan tree near a laundry line. Fireplaces in modified trailers
seem to be sure evolutionary devices yet I see no sign of a chimney. But my
roots in this part of the world run deep. I cannot deny my blood. I look for,
and find, a burn barrel near the stack, and see the distorted air still boiling
out of the top. There is a chair, no, two, now I can see a third and this is
the community come and sit and drink place. I’ve sat around a fire just like
this and drank with flag fish people before. Now I see two toy dump trucks near
the fire, where children would play while surreptitiously listening to the
adults talk, learning all the fish flag people lore they need to go nowhere in
life. The owner of the store comes out to glare at me again and this time he
means business. I ignore him, and even if he doesn’t realize it, if he says
anything to me I’m going to shake hands with him, and cough on him. There is a
pair of child sized overalls on the fence around the house, and parts of the
fence are missing. There’s a tire swing hanging from the pecan tree and I
wonder how the hell they managed to get the rope up that high, and what sort of
limb it is connected to up there. Out of the shadows what I thought was a pile
of junk the form of a kayak emerges. A kayak? That is odd but it’s full of
water and I can see the reflection of light where the seat ought to be. It is
the shell of a kayak, perhaps. I can see now the trailer/shed combo is resting
on a concrete slab that is far too large for it, as if they erected the thing
on the grave of a larger building. The wan dawn light reveals a pig trail of
beaten down grass to the dirt where the flag fish people have trodden back and
forth to the convenience store. The light gains strength and I see beyond the trailer/shed
there are two more rows of trailers each one of them with just enough room for
a truck to park between. The owner of the store comes to glare at me again, but
the guy I’m meeting with finally arrives. The store owner knows him and smiles.
“Have any problems finding this place?” he asks.”I was born here” I nearly tell
him.

Anytown South Georgia. Anywhere along US84 it looks just
like this, at exactly the same time of day.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

I’ve been down and out with what feels a lot like the flu
for the last two days.The fever is
there, the coughing is there, I feel weak and generally speaking, I am bitchy.
The weakness of the disease is what is really killing me because it is very
hard to sit upright and concentrate on anything in this condition. Worse, the
mutts sense something is wrong and they give me little peace, as if getting up
and going outside to roll around in the dirt with them might make me feel
better. It would, I know, but at the same time I barely have enough strength to
get up and move around to fix meals and do laundry. Mutt tussling will have to
wait until the weekend, I fear.

The
bonfire party Saturday night was what really kicked this thing off. I breathed
in far too much smoke for it to be healthy for me and I felt bad all day
Sunday. But the fire was good for me, too. It’s been a while since I had a big
fire to play with and it did me good to be able to keep it alive and well in
front of friends. Fire isn’t something everyone does well, but like driving,
most people believe they can do well. Peg is severely OCD when it comes to her
yard and she rakes up every leaf and gathers every twig. Yet this all makes for
a good fire, and while others bemoaned the lack of real kicking flame, I
recognize the nature of the fuel and the nature of the fire. Leaf fires burn
hot and burn deep. Where there is smoke there will be fire so that’s where I
pile more leaves. By the time it began to cool off, however, the fire was
breaking through several points in the pile, as I knew it would, and there was
warmth aplenty for everyone sitting around the fire and talking. Leaf fires are
interesting because the deep burning coals are made of tiny pieces not chunks
like a wood fire. As the fire burns down a bit I dig down and uncover some of
those coals and expose them to the cool night air. In the darkness it looks
like the lights of a city with a multitude of bright spots of light, or the
night sky full of red stars. This is temporary artistry as the coals linger
just for a moment then wink out, as if a dark dawn has arrived in the city of
red lights.

Sunday morning
the weakness began and I was coughing some. By Sunday afternoon it was clear
something was not right. Monday I felt progressively worse, and when I got home
I knew that was it for a couple of days. It was time to dig in, bundle up, medicate,
mediate, and just plain feel sick for a while. I went to the store for chicken
soup and hot peppers. There is little else on earth that makes flu better than
chicken soup and hot peppers. Yet the weirdness began to set in as I became
more ill.

Remember
the film, “A Space Odyssey: 2001”? I read the book long before I saw the movie
so the movie didn’t make a lot of sense when it got down to it, but it was one
of the first screenplays to show futuristic living conditions which I would
enjoy when I reached 2001. Unfortunately for us all, it is now 2011 and none of
the space travel that was shown is here. Worse yet, and I cannot remember why I
don’t remember this of the movie to begin with, “2001” is now some sort of lengthy foot dragging acid trip triggering
slog that ends poorly, not that a lengthy foot dragging acid trip triggering
slog could end well, mind you. This is not the movie I remember when I watched
it when I was healthy. Being sick changes the way to see a lot of things, hence
the condition of the snark.

The book
was much better and the whole concept of the monolith was explained more
clearly. The movie doesn’t really address why the monolith is there or what
happened with the ape people or the leopard, or why the other monolith is on
the moon. The one truly damning part about being a writer is having the sneaking
suspicion that you could have written most things better.

Being
sick makes for much more vivid dreams, and considering the amount of over the
counter meds I’ve been taking it’s a miracle that 2001 didn’t push me over the
edge. You know, now that I think about it, I think I was maybe ten years old
when 2001 came on television and it wasn’t that great in black and white. I’m a
dinosaur, I realize that, but one day there will be a time when no one can
remember video that wasn’t in 3D and then you’ll have the same feeling I get
when I talk about black and white. Considering I can’t buy a ticket to fly to
the moon yet, I’m not holding my breath for universal 3D quite yet.

One
thing I did do was start playing chess again. The computer is beating me like
Amy Winehouse’s ex late night Saturday, but I still remember how to lose well.
Playing chess takes my mind off the fact I can’t think straight or clearly and
sometimes not at all. Hmmm, you know, it doesn’t do any of that, nevermind. But
once upon a time I was a decent chess player and I like playing even when I
lose. Today I beat the computer twice in a row so I must be getting better or
at least more well than I was. The general state of snark will end, hopefully,
tomorrow and I will return to the land of the living. And as always, have a
nice day.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

I have done my share of drinking in my lifetime and when
I was younger I did the shares left over from nuns and monks who had never
touched the stuff. The younger version of me never bought less than a case of
beer and was famous for tossing the cap away from a new bottle of whiskey.
Drink til you’re gone or drink til it’s gone. The philosophy was fairly simple.
I’ve met people who would not drink around their kids and it took a while to
figure that one out, and yes, not having kids did slow down the thought process
a bit. “What if something happens?” a woman responded to me one night when I
offered her a drink after her kids had gone to sleep. “Like what?” I asked. “Like
you” she said.

What she
meant was not that I would happen to her or her kids, but she might wind up too
bombed to realize something was happening until it was too late. That’s a
possibility you cannot ignore if you are a responsible parent, and I’m not
saying people who drink cannot be responsible parents, but it’s the level of
intoxication that is the distinction here. Your kid goes into the bathroom for
a drink of water then breaks the glass, steps on a piece of it, and you’ve got
to drive to a hospital with a good buzz on. Yeah, I get that now. When I was
twenty something things like that didn’t rip through the haze but now I can see
where kids and intoxication do not mix well at all.

I once
sat in on the questioning of an employee who was suspected of stealing some
money from a restaurant. As someone who drank with the guy I didn’t think he
would steal but as a manager I knew damn well when the cash had gone missing
and I knew who had access. The cops let him tell his story and then they
started putting pressure on the facts of where he was and when he was there and
who saw him and what he had been doing there. His first story was he was never
there and then when the cops kept hammering away at why he was there he told
them oh, by the way, he was there, but only for a short time. Finally, one of
them said, “It’s not really stealing if you just borrowed it and meant to pay
it back later, is that what happened?” As it turns out, it is really stealing
even in that case.

There’s
a woman in Missouri who was drinking and has changed her story. Right now, I
would bet you there is a cop who is telling her. “Look, accidents happen, kids
get into things, everybody knows this, it happens all the time that kids get
into things, so the child fell that is what happened didn’t it? It was an
accident, wasn’t it? That was how it happened, right?”

But she
has to know I’m out here too. I’m the man on the jury who will talk the others
into the maximum sentence, not because it was an accident, but because she lied
about it, because she hid the body, put everyone through the searching, and
because she was drunk. She has to hope there are one or two people like I used
to be when I was a pot smoking drunk and not enough people out there who would
like to see her torched for this. For once, I’m betting I’m in a majority here.

It’s
possible she had nothing to do with the missing child. Someone who wanted a
baby saw her buy her box of wine, knew her husband was at work, and knew,
really knew, people like me would blame her. This is me happening to her. This
is getting so ripped she doesn’t hear the dog barking or the child crying and
it’s a very long time before the child is discovered missing. If someone else
did this then someone else planned to do this and they were given a gift of
time the child could not afford to pay. But that’s a reach. The stranger story
sounds a lot like Kenny Hardwick. It doesn’t ring true and in this case she
finally admitted the first story was not. The cracks appear in the lie.

Where is
the baby? The fact that everyone but Lucas and I have been out looking for that
kid means if the parents killed the baby it wasn’t as accident. They went to
real trouble to hide the body so even if it is found there will be damn little
evidence left a la Casey Anthony. They can claim anything they want to and walk
off from it if that case is a precedent. It would not be hard, however, for
someone who took a baby to hide a baby once they were out of the state. I’m a
law of averages type guy and that leads me to think a drunk woman changing her
story is guilty of a lot more than just truly bad taste in wine.

This
time next week I think it will be over. Boxed wine people are not known for
their strength of character and I think both of them are involved, and one of
them will crack. Either that or one of the other kids might have done something
and hid the body as only a kid could. That’s the real damage here to that
family and that would be the longer this drags out the more theories will begin
to pop up like mushrooms in a pasture full of cow patties.

There is
danger here, real danger, that I will be on that jury, and eleven people like
me will be ready, willing, and able, to nuke that woman and her husband, and
all along, they didn’t do it. I won’t really be there, but someone like me, who
remembers drinking and the danger it causes, and the parents who wouldn’t drink
and in the end, they’ll be convicted for that alone, for being bad parents,
regardless.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Moonlight was still pouring through the windows like a
stream that had been released from a beaver dam. The Three were restive in the
beginning of the night, but had settled down to sleep once the evening began to
cool off a bit. This is good sleeping weather with the temperature slipping
down into the fifties at night. Lucas has taken up sleeping on the right side
of me, and he’s a warm puppy. At nearly three years old, Luke is beginning to
edge away from being a puppy and I miss that.Bert is aging rapidly before my eyes and only Sam seems to be holding
steady. I know she’s there before I feel her weight on the bed, and Lucas moves
over to allow her some room.

“When I
was a little girl there was an old man who used to strike matches on the palms
of his hands and then hold the match up to watch it burn out. You could go to a
store then and get a half a box or a quarter of a box of matches, and sometimes
you’d buy a little bundle of ten tied together with a string, and keep them in
a snuff box or such. There wasn’t a need for matches for poor folk because even
paying a penny for something was too much unless you could eat it. Most people
used a flint to start a fire, and folk kept a coal burning in the stove all the
time if they could. Cold winter was dangerous time to go without fire but you
didn’t hear about people dying from it like they do now. Whiskey got to killing
people in the cold and nobody figured that out. It was like they thought it was
keepin’ them warm but they’d wake up dead with it the next morning. Dying drunk
is confusing as hell, you know.

But the
old man said he married a girl too young and her Pa came after her one night so
the man hit her Pa in the head with a shovel and they both thought he was dead.
They took to run and headed up north, plains country, past where there was
people and they found a old sod shack built into the ground. He found a job on
a ranch but hid the girl from everybody cause they was both afraid the law
might put two and two together if they saw her. Neither knew of the cold that
the winter would bring and they weren’t ready for it when it got there. The
rancher took the man out to a place to help dig a wagon out of the mud andthey saw a huge cloud come rushing out of the
north like the hand of God Himself. They got the wagon out but the rancher told
the man they would have to hold up at his place until the snow stopped. The man
had to confess he was hiding the girl so the rancher let him have a horse, and
the man rode back to her, in the storm.

When he
got back it was so cold the grass had already froze in place and broke like
crystal under the hooves of the horse. The sod house leaked a bit, and was damp
cold inside. The girl was wrapped in blankets and the fire had gone out in the
stove. The man tried to flint it up but the cold was too much for the fire, and
night caught them cold and dark.

The girl
told the man she hadn’t bled in a month, maybe longer, and they both huddled
together knowing there was three of them to die now. Without fire, there was no
way to live through the night, and the man knew it. He put his hands on her
body to warm them, to keep them from shaking and he could feel the cold of them
biting into her, but she didn’t flinch from it. He gathered up some of the
feathers from the bed, and some dust, and some wood shavings and tried to flint
a spark into them but not the tiniest light could be bring. He tried rubbing
sticks together but all he got was a thin wisp of smoke. The night grew colder
and the horse tried to push his way into the house before he died, too.

The
rancher and two other hands fought their way to the sod house the next day but
it was noon before they got there. They saw the mound of snow that marked where
the sod house was, but they didn’t see any smoke so they knew there wasn’t much
hope of finding anybody alive in there. The managed to get through the door and
when they did what they saw was worse than what they had imagined.

The old
man telling me this said he and that girl managed to stay together for nearly
fifty years before she died. Her Pa wasn’t dead, and he came looking for them
after a five year spell, and there was two kids by then, and he settled down a
bit about getting hit in the head with a shovel.He had heard about the cold spell that hit
was wanted to know how they lived through it, and wondered if the stories he
had heard were true, and they allowed they were.”

She
stopped speaking and I lay there and listened to the sound of Lucas’ breathing
in the night. The moonlight had shifted around a bit and the shadows were
deepening.

“What
happened?” I asked and my own voice seemed tiny.

“They
let the horse in for the heat of his body but it wasn’t enough. The man took a
knife and slit the horse’s throat, and then cut the horse open, and stuffed the
girl inside, and pushed his way in with her. The rancher and his help found
them frozen into the carcass the next day, but still alive. The meat and heat
of the horse had kept all three living past the dawn. But had the rancher not
come, they would have died in there. That old man liked to strike matches and
watch them burn down to nothing.”

I woke
up to moonlight and Lucas with his head up, looking at something in the dark. I
could smell blood and sulfur in the night.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

If the Internet has done nothing else it has given new
life to dead hope. Once the parents of missing children could fight hard to
find their missing offspring but the window closed slowly upon the searchers
and unless the child was found quickly, or a perpetrator accused soon, then the police activity would decrease by
degrees and finally all but stop.

Very few
of us would remember Elizabeth Ann Gill, a two year old who disappeared from
her from yard in 1965, but I read a story about a missing child, and that lead
to a link about Gill, and here you are, reading about a child you may have
never heard of before. What are the odds that Gill was kidnapped, taken in by
some stranger, raised and then lived to see the sun come up today, and perhaps
see thing, and wonder? Who out there questions the story of their birth? Is
there someone out there even now who is sitting there and now realizes they
might be one of the missing, and might actually be Elizabeth Gill?

I know
it is unlikely, but unlikely too is a child being snatched by a stranger in
1965. In 1992 a man called his wife to report their seven month old daughter had
been taken, and the story slowly unfolded into a case of murder after a year or
so. That happened here in Georgia and there was nothing about the story I
believed at all. The father of the child looked and acted guilty. The police
slowly wore him down and finally he confessed he had “accidently” killed the
child and then hid the body in a state of panic. Does this sound familiar to
you? How many times has this story be repeated? The parents are not always
guilty, don’t get me wrong, but in so many cases where there is a story of some
stranger who has taken a child and gone, the parents are the last to see the child
alive.

The murder
of JonBenét Ramsey was a classic case where everyone knew, they just knew, the
parents had done it, and now the evidence suggests they did not. But the pendulum
swings both ways. The Georgia case was one where the father of the child was a
low life red neck uneducated beer swilling hick who seemed to have the same
nurturing skills as most Cottonmouths. The Ramey’s were well off but their
damning trait was to parade their poor daughter around in beauty contests, made
up to look like a miniature woman, and I suspect that attracted the wrong sort
of attention, but really, what in the hell do you expect out of that sort of
activity? Dress your toddler up as a tramp and when she goes missing you might
wonder why everyone on earth thinks you killed her.

Those
two cases were solved or at least resolved to the point there was a body recovered.
Yet Elizabeth Gill’s family knows no closure. Every woman stopping to ask for
directions or selling Avon, or just passing by their house slowly is a
possibility and a reopening of a wound that will never truly heal. The days
turn into weeks, the weeks into months and the month into years. Birthday come and go without a trace, without
a sign, and like water leaking out of a bucket a drop at a time, public
interest wanes. The people down the street go away from a weekend instead of
looking. A week later the next door neighbors take a day or two off to do some
shopping for their kids. A month later and one of the local deputies goes on
vacation. The parents still frantic search areas searched before and they
search there again and again. The River must have gotten here, people tired of
looking say, and this gives them the opportunity to tell their own kids not to
play near the water, and it gives them an out to stop looking. A two year old
will not be found alive if she wondered off by herself, no, not after this
amount of time, and if she was taken…

There is
a certain sense of disbelief that I have when it comes to missing children.
Perhaps this stems from the world in which I grew up, a very small town, where
everyone knew everyone else, and how closely I was watched, not only by my
mother and father, but by everyone else’s mother and father, and all the
neighbors as well. Anyone with a phone and some idle time would report to a
parent the location of a child or a group of children, and sometimes it was
enough just to be away from the house long enough to be missed to be called in
again. Infants never toddled off alone, and we older kids kept out eyes on the
younger ones like eyes were kept upon us. It was a much simpler and safer time,
but it was also the time in which Elizabeth Gill went missing in a small town.

We have
to live with the idea there are monsters out there. Elizabeth Smart can tell
you about that, and honestly, it is a miracle her abductor did not kill her. Sometimes
the taken are returned, never unharmed, never unchanged, but returned
nevertheless and those parents can begin to live their lives again. Yet the parents
of Elizabeth Gill if they still live, and those parents who children are
missing they wait too. There might be some wild hope, some joyous reunion but
each year the lines in the mirror say no, and each year passes and one day they
realize their child is no longer two or three or four, but twenty- two or
twenty-three, or twenty-four, and even if that child is still alive the
childhood is forever lost. Elizabeth Gill, or whoever she is known as now,
might one day realize she is not who she is supposed to be and may simply chose
to accept her life as is, regardless of the past. That might be very rare, very
rare indeed, but a child being taken by a stranger is rare too.

I cannot
help but feel the ache of an ill healed scar when I read about a child gone. Somewhere
out there are parents, monsters, accidents, and the missing.

Friday, October 14, 2011

I never thought we would really go to war in Iraq because
there wasn’t a reason to go to war in Iraq. Indeed, Bush I thought it was a
terrible idea, and as far as ideas go, the man didn’t have that many to ride
herd on to begin with. Colin Powell thought it was a bad idea too, and Powell
was one of the few people in the Bush II regime who seemed to know what he was
doing, or at least seemed to know what he was supposed to be doing. But Bush
Ver 2.0, if you remember correctly, began stepping towards that war the day he
started looking for help in finding a running mate. He picked Dick Cheney to
head the process and Dick Cheney found Dick Cheney. At that time Cheney was
vice president of Halliburton, and before it was all over with the war in Iraq
was to dump billions and billions of dollars into Halliburton’s coffers.

It’s
difficult to conceive the war in Iraq was a contrived effort to enrich a few
people at the expense of nearly bankrupting one country and destroying another.
But looting and murder in the name of gold is as old as history itself. It’s
difficult to understand how this happened in this day and age until you look
back at our recent history and try to figure out why we went to war in Iraq,
and realize there wasn’t a reason.

Let’s
look back at a few wars and see what we come up with as far as motivations and
such to begin killing other people.

The war
on the native population of the Americas was all about getting their gold and
taking it back to Europe and coming over here and taking their land. The war of
independence of this country was one began with England trying to recoup its
loses in the French and Indian Wars by taxing the colonists who resisting
paying by rebelling. The War OfNorthern
Aggression was one where the Southern States sought to avoid economic ruin by
hanging onto slavery. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was precipitated by
our economic sanctions on Japan. Our involvement in Viet Nam was one brought on
by first trying to keep France from losing a colony from which they had sought
to turn into a giant rubber plantation. The first Gulf War was entirely about
who would control the oil resources of Kuwait. Most of this is
oversimplification but the truth is wars cost money and they are mostly waged
for money.

The War
OfNorthern Aggression is a good example
of a monetary based war that was sold hard as something it was not. Rich white
land owners convinced poor white Southerners that the Yankees were going to
take away their rights if they didn’t leave the union. Of course, poor whites
didn’t have many rights to begin with, had very little to gain from the present
system. They would have been infinitely better off without five percent of the
population holding onto ninety-five percent of the wealth, but Dixie was
whistled loud enough and long enough to convince men to march off to war not
only to keep other men in chains, but to protect their own poverty. Moreover,
they had to supply their own weaponry, were poorly fed, many had no boots, and
to be wounded on the field of battle meant being maimed or dying of infection.

Do not
presume to judge these men as ignorant hick-folk tricked into dying for a lost
cause until you examine how much of your money, or your blood, was spent in
Iraq, for reasons most people cannot express or comprehend. The money we sent
over there, are sending over there, and will send over to Iraq isn’t simply
disappearing into the sand. Someone is getting this money, and they are getting
a lot of this money, they’ve gotten a lot of this money, and you cannot hope to
expect they are going to want to stop getting this money anytime soon,
regardless of how the taxpayers feel about spending the money.

The
people who orchestrated the second Gulf War lost no power as they gained
billions of dollars. The same emotional factors used to fan the flames of war
ten years ago still exist. The same voices of discord against reason are still
shouting. The same people who make money off of conflict of any sort, be it
warfare or the media who will make money off the rumors of war, are still out
there waiting for another war to begin. The same people, who used duct tape,
talk radio, and scare tactics to convince Americans that there was some sort of
threat from Iraq do not want to push themselves away from the trough of taxpayer’s
money even at the expense of the lives of American soldiers.

If it is
difficult for you to believe what I am saying I ask only that you review
history. The difference here is the country being looted is the invading
country by those people inside the invader’s government. Capitalism on meth has
produced a system that can steer a country to war not to rape another country
but to commit an act of robbery from within. Worse still, American military
personnel return from the war to find a veteran’s system nearly broke and
almost as useless. The economy dictates there are few jobs for those whose
skills have honed in Bagdad and Kabul. We leave behind in those places both
ruin and hopelessness.

This is an unprecedented act of immorality, murder, betrayal
and treason.

So here we are with yet another American president
beating the drums of war with some twisted and convoluted tale of assassination
and drug lords. The economy at the brink of collapse, the banking system
teetering on failure despite billions of bailout money, and with American
troops still fighting two wars that seem not to have any end, and still we are
seeking external influences with which to do battle.

We have been down this road before, people, and ever it
may bring, whatever we do to stop it will be worth the price we pay.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

They passed through silently, invisible and ethereal,
with only some aura of enormity darkening the reality where their assemblage made
their presence palpable. I felt them more than I saw them, and in the dappled
moonlight of that night it would have been easy to dismiss them as shadows, but
who is to say what happened, and what they were, and if at all there was
anything at all there but me and two dogs? Of course, there was the moon, and
certainly we are not going to awaken tomorrow with it gone and everyone realize
it never existed. The moon is real, but just like far too many hallucinations
of the mind, we can see it most clearly at in the dark, and truthfully, how
many times have you dismissed something that did not dovetail with reality
simply because it happened at night?

Yet
there he was, in the middle of the day, a man in a pickup truck that drove
right past me, right past the barricade I was setting up, and he never hit his
brakes. I caught up with him at the detour point, the place where the railroad
people were taking the tracks out, and I asked him why he went past us like he
did. Barricade? What barricade? He could have been lying about it but he really
seemed to be genuinely confused. We rode back to where the barricade was and he
looked at it as if it were a toad I had just thrown up out of my mouth. Did
they bring that there after I went through, he asked and I wondered how the
hell he missed it, but he did. His story is the barricade was not in place
until he had returned. My story is he drove right past it. The two are mutually
exclusive.

So what
if the man never existed at all? No, I’m not talking about him being some
literary device, I’m asking what is the probability he never existed to begin
with? He wouldn’t be the first person I knew that wasn’t there. Elbow told me
she once called several of her friends one day trying to decipher if she
actually existed or not, and if you can’t understand what she was asking then
the rest of this is likely to confuse you.

Here’s a
simple test as to whether or not you should keep reading this; have you ever
cried at a movie, or ever laughed at a movie? You know full well movies aren’t
“real” but there you are having an emotional reaction to them anyway. You pay
to buy into a story where people pretend to fall in love then break up or some
other human event, and in the end, you feel emotion over something akin to
children playing dress up. No, in point of fact, it is not a little more
complicated than that. It is very much the same.

I’m
asking you to consider the possibility that a man who went past a barricade and
claimed not to see it was an invention of my mind. Once again, I’m not saying
this man is a work of fiction, I’m saying I hallucinated him, perhaps. Oh? That
has never happened to you at all? You’ve dreamed of people and then awoken to
emotional reactions have you not? How many times have you heard of someone
dreaming their spouse had cheated on them and spent the next day mad as hell at
them? But this was not a dream, you may argue, and I would agree but who is to
say you have to sleep to dream? You meet someone new and have expectations on
the first date but you really do not know the person that well. Who you think
they are may or may not fit what you’ve already decided in your mind who they
are, and when it gets right down to it, and it does, how much of who they are
when you are with them is a function of who you perceive them to be? In short,
they already exist in your mind before you actually know who they are. How much
this affects them I cannot say.

Do you
see where I’m going with this on a personal level? We can agree if two people
meet and like one another it changes how they interact, even if they’re just
standing in line to buy groceries as opposed to two strangers, even if there
were the same two people just a week ago. Forget what you know of me, or the
Barricade Ignoring Man, and just for a moment ask yourself how those two
people, one putting up a barricade and one ignoring it might interact, if you
are going to accept people do interact subconsciously with one another. You
might put forth that the man with the barrier was invisible because he is just
that type of person, the kind who blends in well, and the BIM is the type to
ignore others outside his own little world. Is it such a leap to believe that
you will not see something that is there even though we both know some people
see things that are not?

How does
all of this happen, this seeing things and not seeing things, and feeling
things that were not there and buying things to feel that aren’t really there?
Maybe it’s like some intracranial cosmic combination lock where someone, or
some movie, turns the right tumblers and you feel or fail to feel. Maybe your
mind is scrolling through what happened last night at home while you are at
work and some song from 1977 comes on the radio and you remember s vividly that
girl who allowed you to take her jeans off of her during that song and suddenly
there’s a man talking to you about a barricade you didn’t see and you wonder
just how much of a lunatic he might be. Or maybe it isn’t personal at all, and
we’re no more than migrating brain waves who personalize these things much like
our ancestors did full lunar eclipses and earthquakes. They thought these
things were personal, intimate happenings, much as we perceive our thoughts to
be. But to think of that girl in ’77 and that song you have to realize someone
write the song, sang it, played guitar, produced it, marketed it, sold it at a
record shop and decades later, someone played it right then and there. Who is
to say our minds are not geared to random thoughts, like migrating wilderbeasts.
who know little of where they have been and nothing of where they are going,
and we pass these thoughts around as they migrate from one person to another,
taking invisibility to one, blindness to another, love to a pair here, and a
shared smile to gnu lovers, who gnu not why they smiled.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

There is something poisonous about believing your own
hype and the Philadelphia Eagles are discovering that the hard way. The so
called “Dream Team” replete with high priced free agents and the newly anointed
multi millionaire and alleged human being, Mike Vick, the Eagles were supposed
to take the NFL by storm this year and win it all.

But then
again, maybe there is something poisonous about letting a dog fighting disease
mongering ex-con pot head quarterback your team. Maybe, and this is a stretch
considering the moral state of the National Football League, but maybe the
other players on the team feel as if they’re a part of something so morally
bereft there is some sort of wicked Karma lurking behind each play. The Ghost
of Bulldogs Murdered are haunting the Philadelphia Eagles and so far, they are
being dogged with a lot of very poor play.

Mike
Vick’s moral and ethical vacuum aside, he has never been a great quarterback
for an entire season but he has been a less than average quarterback for a very
long stretches, and they are in one of them now. They’ve dropped four games in
a row, including a game last week that seemed out of reach by the fourth
quarter. Remember last year when they were playing against the Packers and all
they needed was one good pass in the end zone to live to play again? That
happened again today with Vick tossing one of four interceptions that ended the
game for them. If you can make Mike Vick think you can make Mike Vick blink.

Vick is
losing games to sub quality teams. These are not the best the NFL has to throw
at him and he has to know that if he cannot win the little games then each game
gets bigger and bigger. One interception isn’t a game ender unless you have
already thrown three before and have allowed your opponent to run wild. Your
opponent’s defense can take more chances when they’re ahead and that makes
interceptions more likely. It’s a vicious circle when it comes to underperforming
quarterbacks, and Vick has proven he can underachieve with the very worst of
them.

It’s a
long row to hoe for a team that had such high expectations.With eleven games left they have to hope to
win most of them, let’s say seven out of eleven, and that will still get them
no better than 8-8. That won’t get them into the playoffs, likely, so now every
game they play is critical, and every play is crucial. Four losses this early
isn’t a death sentence for any team but it’s a hole not easily climbed out of
and there is no longer any room for error or emotional outbursts, the likes of
which Vick has been infamous for in the past.

Like
Tiger Woods’ mental issues you have to wonder how much of Vick’s woes come from
being who he is. Woods’ failures were of a marital sort, and in time he may
find some way to forgive himself, and the public may forgive him too.Yet Vick’s failings are another breed
altogether. He has shown himself to be deeply twisted, cruel and inhumane to a
point that is unconscionable and unforgiveable. The dog people are out there in
the stands barking at him and howling in delight with every mistake, and there
has been plenty to howl about lately. With each new failure, Mick Vick has to
know time is slipping away from him, and any chance of that he will be
remembered for anything other than a dog fighting disease mongering pot head ex
con will soon be gone.

Monday, October 3, 2011

I never meant to murder Cale Timmons but I did, and that
is the end of that part of the story. I’m dead now too, or you’d never be
reading this, but I wanted to set things right after I was gone so here it is.
It was on August the 20th, 1992, and I remember it was the day
before payday and it was ungodly hot. It had been hot since May and there
wasn’t any kind of a break in the heat. It hadn’t rained for a spell either,
but that day, just before sundown there came a short hard rain, and I remember
that rain because I stood in it hoping the blood would be washed off of me.

Cale
owned me some money and he had told near everybody he wasn’t going to pay me
because he didn’t have to pay me. I went over there hoping he’d give me some
dope or something for the money, and I wouldn’t have stopped but I seen there
was nobody at his trailer. That bird dog, Dan, was chained to the Chinaberry
tree and I hated to see a dog live his life that way. Rain or shine, heat or
cold, Dan was going to live out his days from a puppy to death on a ten foot
chain and that was going to be his whole world. He had to hope Cale would
remember to feed him, and put some water in that five gallon bucket, but dying
slow or dying fast, Dan had seen everything he was going to see. I thought
about asking for Dan for the money, but I didn’t have a place to put him
either.

Cale let
me in and told me right up front he didn’t have no money which I knew was a
lie. I tried to get some dope from him and he told me he was out and I knew
that wasn’t true either. Cale wasn’t having much time for me, and it was making
me mad that he was treating me this way, and he kept calling me boy and cussing
like all of this was my fault, and as I sat there I noticed there was a gun on
the table so I picked it up. I slid the action back, and it was loaded, and
Cale cussed me again and told me to put it down. I knew he didn’t have money
enough for a Glock, so I knew it was stole, and he told me if I gave him a
hundred dollars and forgot the money I owed him I could keep it. I told him I
wanted his money and I kinda pointed the gun at him, you know, so maybe it
would scare him a bit. Cale got mad at this, and I knew I ought not to have
done it, but he went over the deep end, and really laid a cussin on me then, he
took his shirt off and told me to shoot him right there in the chest and
laughed at me, and he said that I wouldn’t do it, and that I wouldn’t never
seen a dime from him, and he was going to tell everybody how he took the gun
from me, and slapped me with it, so I shot him.

I wasn’t
ready for how loud it was, and I had never seen a gun fired on the inside of a
trailer. The smoke was worse than I thought it might have been, but I had never
thought about it, really. The bullet hit Cale what looked like right in the
heart and he fell over backwards hard. I couldn’t believe I done it. The whole
thing felt weird like a dream and I started panting I was so scared. I threw
the gun down but thought that if they came and took fingerprints on it mine would
be there so I took Cale’s shirt and started wiping down the gun and it went off
again. That made me drop the gun, but I had to get the prints off it so I tried
again. That last slug went through the window and I hoped it didn’t hit nobody
outside. I wiped down the doorknob and everything else I thought I might have
touched and went outside. It started raining and raining hard, and Dan was
there looking at me, not moving, not wagging his tail like he did when he saw
me most times, but like he knew what I had done. I was scared he’d bite me if I
turned him loose and it was hard leaving him there like that but it was even harder
to go to the Sheriff and tell them what I done. I didn’t meant to. I could say
that. It was a’ accident. The gun just went off and that was that, but I
couldn’t.

Jimmy
Cox went in for hitting that Bronson kid in the head with a brick while they
were fighting and he got three years for that. He wasn’t right when he came
out, and his sister told folks he had to get an operation down low to get him
right after what happened to him in prison, because of getting raped so much
and all. They were going to sue the prison for it but they couldn’t get Jimmy
to talk about it at all. Jimmy drowned just three month after he got out and
they say that’s why, that he did it on purpose. Jimmy didn’t start that fight,
and even if he did kill that kid Jimmy didn’t mean it, and it wasn’t his fault,
I didn’t think, but I knew if they put Jimmy in they’d put me in, too, so I got
in my truck and started to leave. I don’t know why I went back in after the
gun, but suddenly I had to. I was going to throw the gun away somewhere, and I
hoped that was a better idea than leaving it. I was scared. I didn’t really
know what to do.

Down
close to the river, a couple of miles west of it on the four lane, there’s a
beaver pond the state men never have been able to get rid of, and I think they
quit trying. I throwed the gun hard and stupid me hit the sign there that told
folks it was Lagdale Creek. I picked it up but a piece fell off it, and I
gather all of it and threw hard. I heard it splash, and got back into the truck
and left. Nobody came by. Nobody saw me. No cars or trucks passed me, and it
was getting dark and it was raining. I pulled up in the yard and sat there and
cried for a while because I had never known anybody to get away with murder.
All I had was a single wide on a rented acre of land, but suddenly it was
precious to me, and sitting in front of the tv watching a movie was something I
knew I’d miss when they came and got me. I didn’t sleep much and my ears were
still ringing.

At work
I tried to act natural. I told everybody that I had quit smoking the day before
and it was making me weird so that was what everybody thought was going on. Not
smoking made it worse but I knew I couldn’t hold it down without something to
explain what I was acting different. Me and some guys went to the Pine Tree
Restaurant for lunch and I got my burger and fries tried to talk about the race
Saturday and if Johnson would win again. I wanted a cigarette so bad it hurt
but that was all I had to hide why I was on the edge of coming unglued. If I
picked up and ran all I had was a couple of hundred dollars and a ten year old
truck. When two deputies come in and sat down across from us I knew it was up,
but no matter how weird I felt, the world around me kept running normal.

After
work I went out and got a twelve pack, just like I always did, but it didn’t
help. I made up my mind to stop smoking for a while, just to have an excuse for
acting different. Another couple of hours went by and I realized I had gone
twenty-four hours and not got caught. Maybe I ought to ride by and check, but I
knew better. I thought about what I did every weekend and maybe I ought to do
exactly as I always did. I couldn’t go out drinking and I knew it. I turned the
tv on and drank beer until I passed out. That night I dreamed of being in a
cell and there was a mob of men trying to break into and get me. When I woke up
I knew I wasn’t going to go to jail. I couldn’t tell and I wouldn’t let them
lock me up. My friend Bob called me and wanted to go fishing so I went. The
quit smoking thing was something everybody believed and I wondered why
murdering somebody and stopping smoking made somebody act the same. It was hard
just to sit in that boat with Bob and fish but I knew I had to. It came upon me
this was the same river Jimmy drowned in, and I wondered if we would catch a
fish that had ate part of him. Jimmy was a bigger man than me and played
football in school. What chance did I have if they did that to him? Did he give
in after a while? Did it work that way, that a man was forced to try to bargain
or trade off or do something to keep from being gang raped? I was so scared I
had trouble keeping my pole still and Bob laughed at me and told me I ought to
go back to smoking. It came to me I might never fish again, either, if I got
caught. What if I got the chair, even though they didn’t do that anymore that
was what most of us called it when somebody did. I thought about those fish
down there and if they suspected there was something wrong and I thought about
the law was already looking for me, or waiting for me to come home. Maybe somebody
was there with Cale and I never knew and right now they were telling the story
of what I done.

Bob came
over after we got done fishing and I hated him for it, but couldn’t think of a
good reason to say no. I bought a case of beer and tried to drink myself drunk.
I wanted to tell Bob, wanted to spill my guts, just get it out, maybe he could
help, Bob was smart, he could help, and maybe there was a way out I didn’t see,
and maybe there was some way out of this. Did Jimmy try to get out? What if
somebody on the inside came looking for him after he was out? That thought
scared me worse than anything else. Bob’s brother called him on the cell and
Bob started saying things like, “Cale Timmons?” “Shot?” “When?” “and they think
Cooter Scarbough done it?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Bob hung up
and told me Cooter Scarbough had been arrested for killing Cale Timmons.

Seeing
Dan in the back of a pickup truck down at the Pine Tree was a weird thing. He
had gone from a ten foot chain to riding in the open air but he still gave me
that same look. He didn’t growl at me or shy away from me but stood there
looking at me. Alicia Scarbough had taken him in after the trial and all, and I
tell you, that trial was the hardest thing that ever happened to me. To see a
man like Cooter Scarbough put on trial for something I did, knowing what they
would do to him, was brutal. But Cooter had threatened to Cale if Cale didn’t
stop seeing Alicia, even though it was Alicia who was sneaking off behind her daddy’s’s
back to see Cale. They had even spent a weekend at Cooter’s house when he was
gone to Florida, and it turns out there was Glock missing from Cooter’s gun
cabinet. Alicia nearly did her own daddy in when she found the body cause she
told them her daddy had killed Cale. The trial didn’t last very long because
Cooter had too many people willing to say where he was. I sat in the courtroom
and wondered how many other men like me had sat in that room and knew the truth
of it while another man was on the edge. Alicia took Cale’s truck and took Dan
in, and it was some years before she went back and spoke to her own daddy, and I
hated myself for that. The law thought
he done it and quit looking after the trial.

I
wondered about the gun. How long did it take one to rust out or at least rust
down to where they couldn’t tell where the bullet come from? A year went by and
then another one after that, and then there was the day a new Sheriff, guy
named Collins, got elected and he said he was going to open up a lot of the old
cases and he came to talk to me about what I knew. Collins was from Macon and
got busted up in there for beating his wife or such, and came down here to be a
big fish in a small pond and folks bought into it. He asked me about if Cale
owed me money and I told him that he did, but he had paid me before he got
killed. He asked me if I had seen Cooter around that day and I told him I didn’t.
Collins looked at me strange like and I felt funny again but I had lived with
this thing for a while and I knew unless I said something nothing would ever
happen to me. He asked me who did I think killed Jimmy Cox and I asked him why
he said that. Didn’t matter, he said, just asking.

I quit
drinking after that. I started going to the meetings down at the church for
drinkers, not that I thought I had a problem but because I needed some group of
people that might be as bad as me. I was surprised to see some of the people
there but none of them were surprised to see me. I started over in Valdosta at
tech school and they taught me how to write computers up and I landed a job
down at the battery factory and then got my own shop. I rented the safe deposit
box you found this letter in back in 2001 and never opened it again. I knew
when I died someone would open it, and now you know who killed Cale Timmons.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

In the works of
the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any
more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back
to the language itself—as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony—those aspects of
language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch
of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is
speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our
anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an
entertainment, as a "read," commits an anthropological crime, in the
first place, against himself.

There was the true story about the two guys who called
9-11 and reported they had barricaded themselves into their kitchen. It seems
that a gang of men in a boat had broken into their apartment and began looting
it. The Atlanta police were more than a little suspicious of this call because
the men were in the second floor of a building and it hadn’t rained in a while.
After the men allowed the police in, ostensibly to rescue them from the midtown
pirates, the police discovered yes indeed this was a meth related incident and
a good laugh was had by all of those who did not wind up in jail.

Before
you write this off as yet another meth induced downward spiral as so many of
them turn out to be, please consider this’ both men claimed to have seen the
Pirates of The Chattahoochee swarming through a window. Okay, that wasn’t
exactly their story but you get the idea. Both men shared a hallucination. Both
of them told the same story even though to most of us out here in not- ever-
going- to- think- about- doing- meth-because- of-such-as- this- and- bad-
teeth- land can’t see past the meth part of the story. But what does it say
that too very stoned men can share a thought at all, much less the same
thought?

Okay,
I’ll buy into Methhead Number One talking Methhead Number Two into believing
there are Apartment Pirates boarding the second story window, avast ye, but
what does even this explanation suggest, if you take the meth out of the
equation? Can one person, in a heightened emotional state, carry someone else
into that state, border crossings ignored, if they have reached some sort of
mutual bond, and this part is important, regardless of how they reached this
state?

Regardless
of how they reached that state, I suggest to you, that meth isn’t the defining
condition here. Do not misunderstand me, please, if you are calling the cops
because the Buccaneers of Buckhead are overrunning your balcony at Little Five
Points, most certainly you have some issues and so does anyone seeing this with
you. Yet I cannot help but wonder how two men on a drug made of poison and nasal
decongestive happened upon each other’s minds somewhere between the Black Pearl
and Jimi Hendrix. Here, in a Drano induced hallucination, two men barricaded
themselves into a kitchen, together against a mad, mad, mad, world, and they
issued a plea for help.

I’m not
defending what they did, or trying to give them some reason to ingest what
might be the single most dangerous illicit drug made in a bathroom, but they,
and many other drug users out there as well, may have been looking for something
in Sudafed they could not find in the real world. Lacking the ways, the means,
or perhaps the opportunity for some real connection, they rearranged their
brain chemistry to connect to another human being, regardless of how dangerous
it might be. It’s why both night clubs and churches are so popular. The chance
to reach into a group of people, or reach out to one person, is enough to lead
people to risk their health or even get up early on Sunday morning and be bored
out of their skulls for an hour when they could be home drinking coffee and
writing.

The
connectivity of drugs and alcohol is what makes both appealing to the lonely
and the isolated. A human being may not be able to find love but that person
will not have a problem finding someone to drink with late at night, and who
knows where that will lead? Alcohol lowers inhibition and both good judgment
and denim jeans hit the floor soon afterwards. Sometimes this works, sometimes
it’s a disaster, and sometimes it is just what it is, and that is good enough
sometimes. But I submit to you the search is the same within regardless of the
medium used to get there.

Love is
more addictive than any drug, more habit forming than any opiate, more
dangerous to the perception of reality than any hallucinogen, and a more clear and
present danger to sanity than every drug combination known to humankind. Two
people can fall in love and believe, truly believe, they can beat the odds of
divorce and break-up by simple virtue of that feeling they have when they are
together, and nothing else. They will believe it will last when it has never
lasted before. They will believe there is hope when there has never been hope
before. They will believe in a future that will bind them closer together, in a
connection so strong that even Death Himself might not break that bond and
this, you tell me, this is a delusion not much far removed from the Jolly Roger
from the second story apartment window, is it not?

Yet I do
believe. Cold and sober in the lonely early morning dawn, I do believe. A half
a century of evidence that is my life stands before me as proof against the
illusion of love, but I believe. I do not think there is anything else to
believe when it gets down to it. The wreck and ruin I have witnessed and lived
and relived and seen again, should be ample and then again against my belief but
it is not, and it will never be. I believe. My life would be easier if I did
not, it would be much more simple to shut the window and turn away from the
plunder that will occur to my heart but I instead stand on the prow of the
sofa, and dare the pirating of my soul. There is no 9-11 to call for a broken
heart. There is no rehab for love. There is no recourse, no treatment, no
twelve step program, no turning back, no cure for this illness and were any of
it available, I would not bother with it. Life isn’t reality at all but the
common illusion of love makes it real. Nothing else is worth living for but
love.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

I haven’t written essays or blogs for a while because I’ve
been writing a novel and I’ve reached a point where I need a break from heavy
writing so here we all are. Writing is something that you either have or you do
not have, like the ability to play a musical instrument or the ability to shop
with coupons. Some people just have the knack. You could attend all the writing
class ever offered but if you’re writing doesn’t come from the soul you might
as well be trying to play a piano with numbers painted on the keys.

I’ve
known musicians who practiced the same piece of music all day long trying to
get it right. It drives people crazy to listen to it, but I’m here to tell you
there isn’t another way to do it. If there was some other way to do it, the
people who play music would do it some other way, trust me. It’s frustrating as
hell to know that somewhere right in front of you is the sound, and somewhere
deep inside of you is the key to unlock that sounds, and you’re trying to
thread a needle to get the two sown together. Yes, I did men that the way I
spelled it, by the way, and if you’ve ever nailed down a piece of music to
where you’re heart and soul and spirit is happy, truly happy with it, you know
exactly what I mean. Writing is like that too. I know when it’s right. I know
when the story is told. I know when it says what I am trying to get it to say.

The odd
thing about music is unless you’re recording your sessions if you do get it
right and it is perfect, it can be gone forever without anyone ever knowing it
was there but you. You may be able to replicate something from memory and you
may be able to bring something back from sitting there and just playing around
with an instrument, but there will be times you create something that exists
only for a moment in time, never to be heard again, and you will be the only witness.
People wonder why musicians are so damn odd and it has a lot to do with just
that. They create worlds that disappear in an instant but music is truly of
nothing but the human soul, released, and amplified, and I deeply suspect those
who create music believe whatever they play, when they do it just right, even
if it isn’t heard by anyone else or recorded, that music exists still, in some
form, somewhere, waiting for someone else to catch it again, and release it
back into the wild, where only those who make music can play.

I know a
poet who writes everything she does out in longhand, on paper with a pen. She
does have a computer but she likes the way it feels and looks to write, really
write, with ink, and work around the mistakes by scratching it out, marking
through things, and getting messy with it. I like that style even though I
rarely write that way. I can’t write by hand quick enough to keep up with my
thoughts and honestly it’s hard to do with a keyboard. But show me a musician
who strums an acoustic guitar and backs it up with a harmonica, and I’ll show
you the musical version of longhand with ink. These are the people who go bone
bare, shunning the electronics that prop up some lesser mortals. Here is the
heart and soul of true music, that born of a human being’s heart and an instrument
that will tell on you if your talent is lacking. Show me someone in front of a
small crowd of people with just the barest of necessities and I’ll show you
someone reaching back into the dimmest memory of human beings, when music was
first created. There, the greatest of great great grand parents of us all, had
the guts and the skill and the need to play music for others who could not, and
in that, what we know as music today was born. Live music, when played with
just the instrument and skill of the musician is viscerally and wholly human.
It is part of who we are as a species. It is what makes us a tribe. It is what separates
us from the physical world me live in and takes us to a place created by those
who play music. They live there and we are only passing through, but a simple
man with a guitar and a harp and a heart, can open a door the rest of us cannot
even see.

The
creation of written music is one of the greatest of all human inventions. The
soul of one human being can be transferred through the ages. Recorded music
serves the same purpose and now we can be lifted beyond the ordinary day by
people we may never know in any other way.
The instruments played could be wielded by a woman, a man, a child, a
black, an Asian, a young white man with pimples, a redhead, some aged soldier
of many gigs whose times is ending soon, but in an act of totally equality, the
music moves us to a point we question not once whose lips or hands it passed
through to sooth our souls.

As you
pass in front of some lonely street musician, with a nearly empty guitar case,
remember that you take for granted what you cannot create. There in front of
you is a door to a universe you cannot visit without the sweat, blood, and
endless efforts of that one person, and those who came before. Remember that
this person will come out to that spot and hold open that door for you, and in
return, asks only enough to live with. The musicians hold open a door that we
cannot see, and only through their efforts, do we hear it.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.